Bitcoin: The End of the Beginning

Bitcoin: The End of the Beginning

Bitcoin surged a mind-blowing 1,500% last year, leading many experts to call for the “end of bitcoin.” But this rally isn’t over yet. This isn’t the end; it’s only “the end of the beginning” for cryptocurrency markets. Everyone has heard of bitcoin, but few people own it — and even fewer understand it. That’s going to change in 2018.

Author Malcolm Gladwell defines “the tipping point” as “the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point” in which “ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread like viruses.” Crypto assets reached this tipping point in 2017. Bellwether crypto bitcoin surged nearly 1,500%, and total market cap of the crypto space surged from $18 billion at the start of the year to over $600 billion.

The Crypto Game Has Changed

In just nine years, crypto assets have ballooned from a tiny project among libertarian-minded cryptography experts to a global phenomenon. Corporations and governments are hiring blockchain experts to figure out how to integrate this new technology into their existing businesses. Expectations for the future of this new asset class range from the Holy Grail that replaces all middlemen on transactions (including banks and governments) to the world’s greatest Ponzi scheme orchestrated by state-sponsored actors in North Korea.

However, I believe that investing in bitcoin in 2018 is actually a safer bet than it was two years ago. While the same astronomical returns might not repeat, the risk of total loss has been dramatically reduced.